Female Rochester Students Slay at Appapalooza, Bring Home $10K!

This is just incredible. For the second time, Rochester Public Schools (RPS) students have come home from a tech competition kickin' butt and taking names. This time, members of Team B.A.S.I.C. B.A.L.S.A. (Audrey Whitney, Bailey Klote, Anjali Donthi, Alexandra Bancos, and Simran Sandhu), brought home $10,000!

Officially, it's the 14th annual Minnesota Cup Business Startup Competition held by the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. This team is sponsored by Black Data Processing Associates (BDPA) and RPS,

According to a press release, for the Technovation Appapalooza, the five students got together with the Diversity Council and designed,

...a cell phone app named Bridge that provides resources for immigrants to improve their quality of life in an unfamiliar community by helping them access banking and broader financial support.

Now the students will work to turn their concept into an open-source app the Diversity Council can use.

What is Technovation[MN]? A 12-week program that connects professional mentors to all-girl teams to enable girls to dream up, design, and code mobile phone apps. Coaches keep the teams on track with the support of a few professional mentors. Each team of up to five girls develops a real-world combination of technical and entrepreneurial skills as they code an app and prepare to pitch their idea at Minnesota's statewide event in early May, the Appapalooza. Selected teams have the opportunity to advance and compete in the global Technovation Challenge, as did a middle school team from Kasson-Mantorville in 2015 (which also led to participating in the 2016 White House Science Fair).